Can Design Change the World?

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To paraphrase architect Buckminster Fuller, you don't solve problems by complaining. Why not address the problems directly rather than talk abstractly about, say, a refugee crisis?

Our book is about learning what people in fields other than your own have done and then using what you've learned to improve your own problems. Traditionally, different fields, such as architecture and automobile manufacturing, were siloed.

Product design and communications, poverty alleviation and urban planning were all separate things. But we think if we can combine approaches, we can become radically more effective. I like to refer to Cameron Sinclair, founder of Architecture for Humanity, who uses the term "open source architecture," referring to the open-source movement in computing but then applying it to a new way to make a building.

The book aims to be a call to arms, to provoke individuals and corporations alike to act and solve a wide spectrum of arguably unrelated crises. Isn't that a bit ambitious?

An alarming part of my job is to confront how disheartening and how advanced our current crises are. There are serious climate problems, challenges of extreme poverty and epidemic disease. There are dramatic social inequities and human rights violations around the world. People are hearing those alarm bells.

I think it's not enough to be smart and talk about the problems—now it's becoming crucial to address how to change them. Our site and book are trying to disseminate knowledge from various arenas to spur imaginations and prod them to action. We hope the book will be a resource for people ready to do something and reimagine the world.

Of all the products and inventions in the book, which ones do you think have the potential to have the most far-reaching social and economic impacts?

One that is most iconic is the LifeStraw, a clean water provision device. It's easy to think of clean water in the abstract, but how do you make it possible in places where there is a lot of dangerous contamination? LifeStraw filters contaminated water instantly, so it is clean by the time it touches a person's lips. It could spark a real revolution.

There won't be a need to build purification plants, and the LifeStraw will be able to help those in most immediate need of clean water in a way that's cheaper and more instantly effective than any alternative. I also think the concept of pop-apart cell phones is going to have a huge impact. Hundreds of millions of people around the world have cell phones, and we also change them and upgrade constantly, meaning we throw out perfectly working phones and contribute to toxic e-waste.

One design problem that phone makers who want to recycle or reuse phones face is that it is time-consuming to take a discarded handset apart and put its components in the right bins before they can be reused. So phone designers are starting to design for disassembly. The idea is to make phones that will take only a couple of seconds to take apart. If the idea gets more widely adopted, we could actually move toward the ideal of a zero-waste manufacturing economy.